Truing The Bolt On A Remington 700

The bolt fixture allows the bolt to be held in a lathe chuck. Four grade five bolt secure the bolt in place with two steel straps.

Blueprinting, or truing a rifle action ensures the receiver face, threads, lugs, bolt lugs and bolt face are square to the center line of the receiver. As part of the blueprinting process for bolt action rifles, the bolt needs to be squared. In addition to squaring the rear faces of the bolt lugs, the front surfaces of the lugs, the bolt nose and the bolt face can be trued as well. This article will focus on the use of a La Bounty bolt fixture the techniques we used to square some of the bolt surfaces. Our complete blueprinting article can be found here.

Prior to beginning, we ordered the following items from Brownells for this article:

For this project we will be truing the bolt on a Remington 700 short action. The bolt had been fluted by Kampfeld Custom.

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The bolt fixture allows the bolt to be held in a lathe chuck. Four, grade-five bolts secure the rifle bolt in place with two steel straps.

The rear of the bolt fixture is secured in a four jaw chuck. A dial indicator is used to align the bolt.

The 35 degree profile tool is used to square the rear faces of the bolt.A right-hand turning tool is used to square the front surfaces of the bolt nose and the bolt lugs. These cuts are mostly made for cosmetic reasons. Note that extreme caution should be used when cutting the bolt nose because the metal on this surface is used to retain the extractor. Too heavy a cut can potentially make the face too thin and cause the extractor to fail.

It should be noted that while the bolt face could have been trued while the bolt is still set up in the fixture, we elected to use a Manson kit.

For more information on the complete action blueprinting process, see our article here.

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